I Am Not Yet I Am Not; art criticism

Edouard Vuillard has no sclera, no iris, no eyes. There, holding weight in his face, are the outlets by which vision should once again be charged to circulate through the body’s system. It may be taken that his eyes are simply closed, but examining the space closer, the ridge of the eyelid on the eye closest to the ear is incredibly prominent and perked up, as when the eye is opened. A rather grotesque portrait, yet fulfilled in itself with the complement of light and the mirror’s frame. The window’s absence falling upon his forehead and hair, the several caves propagated throughout the field of a once familiar bust—his reflection is escaping into the background of the mirror, and despite the weight of the white wall to his right, the heaviness of the window frame above him, what is not (the eyes and the lacking window) form a labyrinthian spiral into their center. 

To wonder, then, how it is that the portrait was painted without vision and with the disturbance of light upon the lack of vision is a proper meditation. Taking the painting literally generates the narrative. Perhaps the painter was granted vision and its proper sensitivity to light for the duration of his painting-act. In the plucking of one white stalk of canvas, vision accompanied the production of representation. The Other/gods allow us to see as long as we seek to represent and represent in accordance with their laws. The mirror’s frame and accompanying wallpaper were the first to be rendered, derived by the clarity belonging to them. The domineering white wall to the right of the reflected painter was next, along with the light above him. Then the structure of the window and the reflection’s background—to the soft painter’s coat and the collar of the shirt underneath it. More time devoted to the glowing beard. And from the burning bush, Vuillard encircles his reflection’s face; and as he approaches its center, less form is distributed because the painter’s eyes are beginning to shut in on themselves (because the end is near), until the eyes are reached and are given over to ambiguity. In front of the mirror and his canvas, Vuillard stands blind, equipped to move away from the prior world of representation and toward another ocular mode, by which he could cultivate the following piece: 

Christ speaks of disguising what the right hand charitably does from its left. It is a calling toward becoming-blindness, a project concerned with rejecting prior forms of representation (as in, do not let the left frame the right). If we are to transcribe his commandment, it may be defined as, disguise your difference (the difference you make). The Divine is revealed in its supposedly hidden charity and difference, immediately contradicting itself with its display of showmanship on Golgotha. We should not speak of difference only in terms of the aid we provide to our fellow human: that is a banal interpretation. Rather, even within the former act, what prompts me toward the action of the right hand rests precisely in my affirmation of virtual difference: the rejection of established relational seeing. Abstaining from categorization, I renounce my separation from the supposed other, I draw parallel to the law of the Other, I allow the abyss between the individual, myself, and the Other to generate the Real, I fall into the Real, I move farther into the Other and away from the Other simultaneously. From the outskirts of false consciousness I move inward into the ineffable, the fogged edges; when I lack clarity it is because I have yet to discover language to capture myself beyond prior ideology. What we take from our painter for our own aesthetic movement is the journey into the blur, to inhale and exhale the science of confusion, to plot new land with faulty language that will need to be refined gradually. I sink further into the difference I cannot yet name, as though I were hiding it from myself, from the left hand, from the prior yolk of seeing. 

It is an aesthetic movement, as related to representation and the supposed dictates related to representation. A stagnation in my art always presupposes relegating myself to the transgressive as well as the transgressed: I affirm the Other above who articulates both Others when I ought to be moving away from the one and toward the Other and away from it. What is new is made so only as a consequence of rejecting all-rejection rejected: the generation of a new Other, which is accomplished in the space between the Other I move away from and the Other I move toward. In our journeying, we require clarity, the ground of immanence: we come across the greatness of Marx and his dialectical materialism: we trace the lines exploding onto each other and imploding in their brass applause. We find how far our vision has come from the ocular cults that have preceded us. We determine, as much as is present within our current capacities, the necessary becoming-blindness that must be pursued. We move along the edifying path of undulating existence and discover and abandon what withholds us from ourselves and each other; the difference that has become calcified in the frame of the mirror, which melts as we move closer to our linguistic center (the collapse-point within the tool of representation). 

And to move beyond our current visions, we require the collapse of our adopted capitalism’s self-perception. Becoming-blindness is not an effect of an irrationalism or alienation: it is the effect of scientific analyses that generate such disruptions. An aesthetic disruption is required before our forthcoming revolutions. From the disruption I take that I can no longer afford to view myself as myself-to-be-offered-as-a-service. I am lowly and despair because I have yet to shed the commodity and its expiration that I am. I hold the wrong idea of the body and I am consumed by the sad passions because of it. We move forward only through non-recognition: that I belong in the movement of atoms in my non-self’s continuation, that I do not but an I persists when I am not. Vuillard bars himself from his self-portrait: there is no returning to the prior representation. Where he can no longer see he is not, and from the absence, the cultivation of new modes of presence and absence. What revolutions arrive will require such a commitment: a complete rejection of what preceded the rejection, to even the rejection of the rejection.